


compete against the stars

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M, Heavy Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-14 11:44:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16491947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: It's always a car crash, isn't it?





	compete against the stars

**Author's Note:**

> So I swore to myself that I would not do this, but that G&G/VM Mahler post kept going around tumblr and I couldn't help myself. So really you should blame that.  
> Huge thanks to the writers' guild GC without their support and immeasurable talent I surely would have never finished this.  
> The title is from Sleeping At Last's In the Embers.  
> WARNING: brief mentions of suicide  
> This is a work of complete fiction.  
> Enjoy? I guess?

Tessa startles awake in the middle of a dream sometime after four am three days into the new year. It takes her half a minute to claw through her own mind and realize that there was a sound that woke her, and that it’s her phone ringing, still plugged in on her bedside table.

“Hello?” She blinks against the blue-grey shadows of her bedroom, fighting the weight behind her eyes telling her to just go back to sleep and deal with whatever it is in the morning. 

“Tessa,” Danny says, sounding like an older brother, like she’s eleven and he’s telling her to put her seatbelt on. Like she’s fifteen and he’s holding her hair back as she pukes up wine coolers into the bushes at an Ilderton summer party. Her stomach turns to lead. Suddenly she’s wide awake. 

“It’s Scott.” He says, like a scene in a movie. She feels like she’s watching herself. “There’s been an accident.”

“What hospital?” she answers automatically, kicking her feet free of the covers. There’s already too much space between her and her body. The chill in the room digs needles into her skin like the after effect of hitting her funny bone on the ice. 

“Tess,” Danny says. “He’s gone.”

There’s always a moment, right before she falls, when she knows without a doubt that she’s going to fall, but it’s too late to stop it. It’s an awful feeling. Her stomach gets left behind, her lungs grab hard onto her next breath, and she can taste the metal behind her teeth where the bone shock will hit before it even happens. 

Usually, he yanks her upwards before she hits the ice.

“No.” She whispers because it can’t be true. She would have felt it. She would have known. She would have woken up. Screw soulmates and scientific reasoning – he’s her other half. 

“I’m so sorry, Tess,” Danny’s voice cracks, and he chokes, and Tessa can’t feel anything at all. She’s all cold, frozen solid through, like in practice, when her toes go so cold in her boots that it feels like they’ve cracked off completely. With any weight at all, she’d shatter like surface of a late March puddle. 

“No.” It’s not possible. 

Danny keeps talking. Something about calling Kate. Something about how she shouldn’t be alone. Something about how he loves her.

Her stomach wretches her out of bed. The call ends and she gags on nothing. Her knees crack against the tile floor of her bathroom as stomach bile burns up her throat. Tears drip down her face, but she’s not crying. 

It’s pitch black out still. She slumps against the wall, sitting on the floor, and lives with the terrible taste in her mouth. A shudder runs up her spine. The cold is entirely internal. 

Her phone is somehow still in her hand. She looks down at the screen shaking in her trembling hands, blurry through her tear clouded vision. There’s a notification blinking up at her. 

_(1)Voicemail – Scott Moir_

 

_One Week Earlier_

“I’m just saying.” Scott tugs on her hand and Tessa matches his strokes across the ice on rote instinct, covering her yawn with her other hand. It’s far too early _and_ it’s boxing day. She should be curled up in her bed, snuggled in with her quilt until at _least_ ten. 

But no, she’s up before the sunrise at the Ilderton rink because Scott asked. And she feels guilty because her program has been taking up so much of her time the last few months that skating has fallen out of her schedule. And he promised her brunch. 

“There should be some kind of universal rule. No tiny feet on bladders for us childless before eight am.” He’s complaining but he loves it. He can’t wait until it’s his own kids piling in and shaking him awake before the crack of dawn on Christmas morning. 

Tessa laughs at him and follows his crossovers around the curve of the rink. “I think it’s supposed to be pre-emptive retribution for whatever noisy or obnoxious Christmas presents you got their kids.”

He lights up. “Did I tell you about Charlotte?”

She shakes her head and he launches into a detailed description of his niece’s reaction to her presents. 

Once he finishes, he splits off on another tangent, accustomed to holding most of the conversation while she wakes up. 

“You’re coming to New Year’s, right?” He asks as they glide to the edge of the rink to change the music and get to work. 

Every year the extended Moir clan throw what they claim to be the biggest New Year’s party in Western Ontario and every year they’re too busy training to attend. Except they’re retired now, officially. 

She grins at him, however sleepily. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

It’s early, but the truth is she doesn’t mind. The truth is she’d rather see him, even if the only few hours over the holidays they’re both free of family commitments is before the crack of dawn. She’s warmer here than she would be in her bed anyway. His hand in hers is practically a burning ember, it warms her all the way through. 

 

She sits at Alma’s kitchen table. There’s a blue mug with a chip in the handle full of hot chocolate in front of her that she hasn’t touched. Someone pressed it into her palms after they’d steered her into this chair after her mom had dropped her off. She couldn’t get into her car, couldn’t even touch the keys. 

It’s been less than twelve hours but every minute feels glacial. It feels frozen. 

She sits in Alma’s kitchen with a mug full of hot chocolate in her hands and all the Moir women around her. The men are in the basement, watching the kids, and it feels oddly archaic, how naturally they’ve segregated. 

Her mom only brought her over because she had to drop Kevin and his kids off at the airport. And Tessa, like she’s eleven again and not a thirty-year-old woman, wasn’t trusted to be in her house alone. 

All morning Kate had been eyeing her. Like any second she expected Tessa to break down, to hurl herself into hysterics, to start screaming, to start crying, anything. But she hadn’t. They’d sat on the stiff white sofa that she still hadn’t replaced and waited. 

The sun rose. Kate drove them both over to her childhood home. 

Kevin had hugged her, long and tight like he never did, when she’d gotten out of her mom’s sedan and stood in the cold of the driveway. He’d held her until she started shivering again then told her he’d be back in a few days for the funeral, this time without the baby.

The baby. Her new nephew. The reason they’d taken such a long trip back for the holidays. 

Everyone else’s lives are still moving forward, but not hers. 

She sits. There’s a chip in the handle of the mug. The heat won’t broach her hands.

Everyone is speaking quietly but it’s not a conversation. There are Plans To Make and Things To Figure Out. She only pays attention when they ask information of her, is hardly even aware of who’s speaking. 

Someone will have to talk to the police. Someone will have to arrange to get his car towed from the scene. Someone will have to call the funeral home and the cemetery to ready the plot next to his grandfather. 

They ask: “The police gave us his phone but it’s locked and I don’t-“

“Seventeen, eighty-nine.” She cuts them off. Or she could press her own thumb print into the scanner and open it that way.

Except she doesn’t want to see what’s inside. She turned her own phone off and buried it within a pile of fitted sheets in her linen cupboard so that she could try not to think about that damn voicemail. 

Someone will have to cancel his flight back to Montreal. Someone will have to go through his apartment and clean it out. Someone will have to tell Patrice and his teams and contact Skate Canada for a press release. 

They ask: “Should you be his partner in the obituary or-?”

“That’s fine,” she says. Her voice feels funny in her throat, like she hasn’t spoken for weeks. 

Twenty-two years and she’s only seven letters. 

She sits at the kitchen table, a mug full of hot chocolate thrust between her hands, where she once wrote a book report on _Romeo and Juliet_ while waiting for Scott to get home so they could skate. That had been a Christmas too. She’d, at fifteen, complained to Alma about the uselessness of it all.

 _It was all the Friar’s fault_ , she’d said, _If he’d only delivered the message properly, no one would have died._

It never seemed much like a love story to her. There was too much certainty. A fate, a future written into the stars, no matter how they crossed, was too clean. The dominos all fell too perfectly into place. There was no autonomy. Love, she’s known since she was nineteen, is about choice. 

Now, she contemplates the cosmic fate of a single deer. 

 

Tessa wakes up in the hazy sunlight of a winter afternoon. There’s a kink in her neck from sleeping on her couch and orange light filters through her half-closed blinds even though it’s only three in the afternoon. It won’t be long until the sun starts to set. 

She’s sat in her house for three days. Ignoring her mother’s attempts to get her to eat. Ignoring the cascade of apologies on her phone. 

She can’t take it anymore. 

She gets in her car and cranks the ignition on even with the bubble of anxiety crawling up her throat, threatening to choke her. The radio blasts whatever country station he was listening to as he drove her home the other day and she punches the console to turn it off. The metal scratches through her knuckles and she almost bleeds. 

Without allowing herself to think about it, she drives. The city peels away behind her leaving her alone with her thoughts and the snow swept hills. 

The highway’s empty. 

She could press her foot all the way down and watch the speedometer creep upward. She could set the cruise control and take her hands off the wheel. She could unclip her seatbelt and turn off the airbags. She could see him again.

Except that’s not how it works. There’s nothing to crash into.

She pulls over.

It’s bright and sunny and achingly cold. 

The tire tracks have been blown over but there’s a cross in the ditch, dug into the snow, where his car went off the road. A wreath of frozen poppies hangs around it. Picture frames and blown out candles and piles of flowers stack up in the snow. There are at least three teddy bears wearing Leafs jerseys. 

She walks to it, her runners going right through the snow and the snow going right through her runners.  
At the center of the pile is the two of them standing on the podium at the medal ceremony in South Korea. One of the ones where he’s looking at her like she’s the only thing in the world. 

Tears spring into her eyes but it’s only the cold that draws them there. Her chest doesn’t ache, there’s no pressure behind her eyes or burn crawling up her throat. She’s just cold. 

 

“I hate that Plato bullshit.” She sits in the passenger seat of her car with her socked feet propped up on the dashboard while Scott drives the familiar route between Ilderton and London. She’d been on the verge of sleep, worn out by the early morning skating and too much of Alma’s cooking, when he’d started talking about his friend Tom’s proposal speech.

“Oh come on, Tess.”

“What?”

“Don’t you think that’s a little,” he struggles for a word and waves his hand at the empty highway in front of them, “Ironic?”

“How so?”

He gives her a pointed eyebrow, then gestures between them. Tessa scoffs out a laugh. 

“You’re not my soulmate, Scott.”

“Ouch!” he touches his hand to his chest in mock offense and she laughs fully. 

“That’s not what I meant though.” He turns back to the road and she swallows the familiar unease that blooms every time they get too close to talking about what else could be between them, now that they’re retired. It’s been almost two years since the Olympics but they still have never properly talked about it. She tells herself it’s because they’ve been too busy. 

“Oh?” She stares at the snow in front of her own bit of windshield. 

“Yeah. I mean, obviously it’s all a little made up but hasn’t there always been just a bit of magic in our skating?”

She sinks her teeth into her bottom lip and thinks. She knows what he’s talking about. How their lines match on only the second run through of a new dance. How their heights always just lined up. But to her, it’s always been more about how they’ve built themselves around each other, rather than some innate shape locking them together like pieces of a puzzle. They’re two people creating together, not halves of a whole being. 

“I just think it’s kind of reductive, that’s all.” She says, leaning back in her seat as he turns into her neighbourhood. “Like, if somehow we were meant to be, it makes the work we did less real, or less important.”

“I don’t think anything could make you less impressive, T.” He replies, catching the weight of what she didn’t say all to easily. 

She doesn’t want her suffering to be predestined either. 

 

It feels like all of Ilderton and most of London spills through the Moir’s little house behind the rink. There are all of his school buddies piled in, and what must be half the Canadian Olympic team. 

Tessa sits in a dining chair stuck in the corner of the living room. People, ones she’s known since she was a child and relative strangers, keep coming up and giving their condolences. 

She feels like she’s playing a part, the grieving widow, even though she wasn’t his wife. When it really breaks down, she’s slowly realizing, she was hardly his anything at all. Twenty-two years and her line in his obituary is still just ‘partner’. She never meant for it to end that way. 

She hasn’t been to a funeral since she was holding his hand at his grandfathers. 

Her hands are so cold the base of her fingernails are tinged blue. They have been for days. 

After the fifth unknown Moir cousin squeezes her shoulder in a way that she supposes is supposed to be reassuring she decides she can’t just sit there anymore. There’s nowhere to go really. Alma won’t stop rummaging around the kitchen, not that she’d be much use there. The living room and dining room and downstairs den are overflowing with stilted and polite conversations. Even the yard is full of kids. 

She steals up to his bedroom instead. 

It’s obvious nothing’s been touched. The bed’s unmade, his duffle bag from Montreal sitting at the foot of it. Notes cascade over the little desk in the corner. A _Moir’s Skate Shop_ hoodie drapes over the back of the chair. 

She picks it up and pulls it over her proper black dress. It drowns her, coming down to her thighs and filling her lungs up with his smell. She’s never been so happy to sink.

She sits on the edge of his bed, the mattress creaking beneath her, and the heel of her shoe hits something hard. His skate bag, she realizes peering around the blankets slipping down to the floor, wedged halfway under the bed. It should have been in the car with him; he usually never bothered to take it out of his trunk. 

Tessa pulls it free from the tousled blankets and opens it. The room is so silent she can hear each tooth of the zipper unlatch. 

The bottom of the bag, she knows, is a mess of old rags and dirty socks. There are sweaters that he’s long forgotten about and more than a few pairs of discarded boxers. But his skates lay neatly on top of it all. 

She takes one out and hooks the cherry coloured guard off the blade. It reveals his name, written in fancy script and _Dance_. Then at the end, by the heel, a small _V_. So, he said, he’d never really be skating without her, even if they were retired. 

It’s full of evidence of his use. The first tine of the toe pick is worn. The thread of the right lace is unravelling, just slightly, where he yanked on it every day. Scuffs litter the boot.

There’s a dent in the side of the leather where she caught her toe pick a few of weeks ago in a dumb stumble that sent them tumbling down to the ice like a couple of pre-novices. Scott had made a crack about winning in 2022 and they’d laid on the ice giggling over themselves for long enough that melting snow had started to dampen her back. 

She thought she was done having to be worried about this. It wasn’t 2014 anymore. He didn’t get blackout drunk on weekdays and leave her voicemails he didn’t remember saying how sorry he was anymore. 

He was good. _They_ were good. He’d grown up. 

She presses her thumb into the flat of the blade. The metal digs into her flesh, scores a line deep through her fingerprint. It doesn’t cut her. 

 

“Happy New Year, Tess.” He whispers in her ear mid count down. His hands land comfortably on her hips and she leans into the warmth of his chest. 

The shouting in the room drowns out the numbers spilling out of the TV. At one point she had a glass of champagne in her hand for this moment and she’s not sure where she lost it but he’s better than the drink anyway. 

She turns to kiss him, just a quick peck on the lips is all she intends as the room erupts in celebration. But he hesitates. And her fingers lay against his chest, over the beating of his heart. And the intensity in his eyes while hers flutter shut makes her stomach dip as she covers his lips with her own. His hand curls around her jaw and neither of them pulls away. 

The last time he kissed her like this she was nineteen and terrified their career was ending. 

But this isn’t then. They’re still at a party, surrounded by people, so she draws back after a moment. He doesn’t let her go far and when she opens her eyes his are shining. Her stomach twists for a different reason. 

“I don’t know.” She whispers knowing he’ll hear over the roar of celebrations. 

“I know, Tess.” He kisses her cheek. “It’s okay.” He rubs her arm and doesn’t move away. 

She wants to explain but she doesn’t know what the words are. She wants this with him, of course she does, she’s wanted it since she was fifteen. But she’s wanted it since she was fifteen and she doesn’t know what that means anymore. 

“Skate on Friday still, right?” He squeezes the top of her shoulder and the warmth of his grin doesn’t fade. 

“Yeah.” She wraps her fingers around his wrist to keep his hand. “Of course.”

He tugs her phone out of her pocket and pulls her into her chest. “For posterity, eh?” he asks, as he opens up the camera. “To many more new years.”

It’s dim in the room, and she wants to tell him it’ll make a terrible photograph but with the drinks she’s had and his kiss bubbling warmly through her veins she can’t find it in her to protest. She grins at the camera for the first picture, then tilts her neck to look up at him while he takes a second. 

 

She thinks she’s supposed to dream of him. Isn’t that how it goes? Her subconscious should try to save herself some suffering and draw up images of him. It should allow her to live out all the decisions she was too afraid to make, to hold tight the life she was always afraid to grab on to. But she doesn’t sleep. 

While she waits for respite that doesn’t come she plays over old memories instead. Each one burns her. 

Sitting on his couch drowning in readings while he sang along with the radio and cooked them dinner. Mornings in Montreal when her alarm went off too early and she’d sit up in bed to find he’d snuck in to leave her coffee, still warm on her bedside table. Falling asleep on his shoulder on planes and trains and busses and in the back of her mom’s car, driving home after practice, feeling like there was no safer place she could be. Movie marathons in Canton on American Thanksgiving. Dancing through more cities than she can count. 

The worst one is also the best one. She thought she’d buried it so deep she’d forgotten it, but in the sinking winter night it crawls back to her. 

His hands mapping out her bare skin, painting sunshine coloured bruises over her hips, along her upper thighs. The feeling of his breath wafting over her cheek, the beat of his heart underneath his skin, none of it so different from how it was on the ice. They’d only been kids, so afraid to lose each other. Sometimes, if she closes her eyes tight enough, she can almost feel his fingers weave between hers and squeeze. 

Dawn creeps up on her every morning and she’s still alone. 

 

Tessa wakes up on New Year’s Day with a pounding headache, Scott breathing on the back of her neck, and a wash of deja vu. 

It leaves her just as quickly as it came but it’s not an unwelcome feeling. She can’t count the number of times they’ve woken up like a pile of limbs. On his couch in Montreal. Too many hotel rooms to count. Her bed in Canton. In this room, with it’s too narrow bed, that’s been his since he was born. 

It’s always the same. Her arm dead weight under him, their fingers still tangled even though she can’t feel it. His nose pressed into her shoulder or neck or collarbone. Her drool on the pillowcase. 

He snores now – just a little, and he’d never admit it – but this room, with its bed and its Maple Leaf sheets makes her feel like she’s eight years old. Like Alma’s downstairs making pancakes and Scott has to slip out of the bed, back to his sleeping bag on the floor, before anyone comes in to wake them. 

But he’s allowed to be here now – in bed, with her – if she wants him to be. There wouldn’t be any lectures on appropriateness or boundaries if his mom walked in on them now, just a sweet smile and a pointed look at Scott telling him he had to help his brothers take the trash out. 

That could be her life. If she wants it to be. 

 

“You don’t have to go back so soon you know,” Alma says. 

Tessa sits at her kitchen table and swallows hard on a sip of hot chocolate. “I know.” She stares at a groove in the wood of the table that was marked in with a pen. There’s a flight booked for the next morning back to Montreal. “I need to though.”

She’s already missed two weeks of classes and if she doesn’t get back into it now, she won’t. 

And she thinks maybe he’ll haunt her a little bit less in Montreal. There are still memories there, of course, they spent years there together, but they’re all new ones. In London, in Ilderton, she sees his face when he was ten and nineteen and thirty-one and every moment in between. 

But there’s one thing she needs before she goes. 

“Alma?” she asks, quiet in the uneasy silence of the kitchen. 

“Yes dear?”

Tessa bites her lip and hesitates. “Can I have his skates?”

A fresh wave of tears bloom in Alma’s eyes and Tessa opens her mouth to backtrack but she’s cut off before she can get a word out.

“Of course.” Alma squeezes both of Tessa’s hands and her palms bleed so much heat she may as well be a ghost. 

“Of course, they’re yours, all of that, it’s yours, Tess.”

Tessa doesn’t think about how she must mean the medals too. For all her ambitions, childish and otherwise, she’s never wanted ten of them.

 

_Scott Patrick Moir_  
_Son. Uncle. Brother. Partner._  
_September 2, 1987 – January 3, 2020_

“Hey Kiddo,” she whispers to the stone. The wind catches her voice and blows it away. He’s not there to hear it anyway. 

She sits down into the shallow snow at the base of the headstone, curling deeper into her coat, her knees drawn into her chest. She strips one hand of its mitten to pull her phone free from the pocket and by the time she’s navigated to her voicemail her skin is already freezing. 

His voice spills through the speaker, quiet and tired, but content. Like late night practice, the way he talked to her under his breath, saying absolutely nothing at all. 

_Hey T, it’s me. I know it’s late, you’re definitely asleep, hopefully I didn’t wake you up with this. I hope you had a good hibernation day. I went and saw Tom and Hayley today. They look happy, stupidly happy. Like, just-found-the-secret-to-eternal-love happy._

There’s a pause.

 _I just wanted to tell you about it. Anyway, love you, see you tomorrow. Or today I guess._ He laughed softly to himself. _Bye Tessa._

**Author's Note:**

> Don't think about Tessa skating alone, reaching for his hand even though he's not there. Don't think about her going back to Montreal and cleaning out his apartment. Don't think about her finding a ring tucked away in his drawers. Don't think about her turning 33 and freaking out because she's older than he'll ever be. Don't think about her never truly feeling safe again.
> 
> Okay. I'll stop. You can yell at me in comments or on tumblr where I'm also @sinkingsidewalks. Thanks for reading. I'm sorry. Love you.


End file.
